Recreating Super Mario Bros with Lego

Zachary Pollock is looking to raise $26,400 on Kickstarter to buy "a lot of [Lego] bricks" for use in a 780,000-piece re-creation of the entire first level of Super Mario Bros. Once completed, it will be exhibited in Portland and Seattle, with possible side-trips to PAX and SDCC.

In 2005, I rediscovered my passion for building big. I realized that as an adult I have much greater access to large supplies of LEGO bricks now than I ever did as a kid. Since then, my projects have hovered between 6,000 – 15,000 pieces. By recreating Level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. in LEGO bricks, this project trumps all of my other work by leaping to almost 780,000 LEGO studs. No one that I am aware of has done a LEGO mosaic on this scale before. Only a small number of people have done work with this number of bricks. The final project will stand over six feet tall and over 90 feet wide.

I’m glad that Kickstarter still gets used for funding art projects instead of just as some kind of prototype-electronics store. I imagine that a lot of people who have only discovered Kickstarter recently through things like the pebble watch will respond to this with “WTF? I don’t want to buy this”